Toward a universal operator encoding for genetic programming

The 2002 CEC paper entitled "Genetic Programming with Smooth Operators for Arithmetic Expressions: Diviplication and Subdition" by Ursem and Krink proposed to blend certain arithmetic operators by interpolation to smooth the transition from one operator to another in the fitness landscape. Inspired by their idea, herein it is shown how to generalize further by using combinations of more than two operators, requiring log(N) additional parameters for each N operators so combined. Comparative results are reported for the application of this methodology to a variety of optimization tasks including symbolic regression, an aspherical lens system design, a UAV path optimization, and a remote sensor image noise filter design.